How many dollars do you need to replace a $3 light globe in remote Queensland? Well, when the job is given to bureaucrats pushing wheelbarrows of red tape, the final bill comes in just south of $500.

Doomadgee State School, on the Gulf of Carpentaria, was billed $200 for labour alone after the teacher was told workplace health and safety regulations prevented any staff member from buying and replacing the bulb themselves, The Australian understands.

Please don’t let your dog drink the bong water.
Calls reporting pet poisonings by marijuana have increased by about 30 percent since 2009, from 213 calls that year to 320 in 2013, according to the Animal Poison Control Center, a division of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

An 80-year-old Iranian man has been tagged as the world’s dirtiest man. It is claimed that the man who lives in isolation hasn’t taken a bath in six decades, according to Huffington Post.
Amou Haji is also known to eat rotten porcupine meat with relish and smoking animal poop.

Environmental Protection Agency administrator Gina McCarthy wasn’t able to definitively say whether the world has gotten warmer in Senate testimony.
Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions asked McCarthy to confirm a statement made by President Obama last year that global temperatures were increasing faster in the last five or ten years than climate scientists had predicted.
McCarthy couldn’t answer the question, saying that she only repeats what the climate scientists tell her.

Lots of modern journos – particularly of the Fairfax breed – need to be told to keep the ‘I’ out of the story. The public is far more interested in extraordinary people and events than in the tedious life and times of keyboard tappers. However, we can only hope that such an order was not the cause of this Fairfax blooper.

Agnostics exercise much patience with the excesses of literalist Christians, Muslims and other dead-certain religious fundamentalists. So, I suppose we should be just as tolerant of what Sydney Morning Herald columnist Paul Sheehan calls secular fundamentalists. It’s hard though when their intolerance flies in the face of the tolerance they claim to possess in spades.

THE Australian Greens want the Lord’s Prayer dropped from the opening of each day’s federal parliament sittings.

Looks like the jig is up for global warming scaredycats. Alarmists, you can pack away those loaded thermometers, pull down those weather stations at airports and in heat-radiating city blocks and quietly disappear.
None other than Time Magazine has blamed the cold polar vortex on global cooling.
Oops, I didn’t check the date. That was 1974 when the US was struck by similar ferociously cold weather as now.
Time explained then:

Scientists have found other indications of global cooling. For one thing there has been a noticeable expansion of the great belt of dry, high-altitude polar winds —the so-called circumpolar vortex—that sweep from west to east around the top and bottom of the world.

But that was then. Time’s view now:

But not only does the cold spell not disprove climate change, it may well be that global warming could be making the occasional bout of extreme cold weather in the U.S. even more likely.

Heh, heh, they’ve finally found some comparative warmth in Antarctica. Thanks to freakish cold weather in the north.

Chicago Extreme Cold: Weather in ‘Chiberia’ Colder Than South Pole
CHICAGO — The wind chill hit 40 degrees below zero Monday morning at O’Hare Airport, and the extreme cold is expected to stick around for the next couple of days, meteorologists said.

Cripes, even fellow-believers are sticking the boot into global warming chasers’ antarctic antics. Yves Frenot, director of the French Polar Institute, has accused those in charge of what columnist Tim Blair calls SS Stupid as embarking on a “pseudo-scientific expedition”.

You’ve got to pity the Cubans. Not only do they have to put up with an inept socialist dictatorship but for 55 years they haven’t been able to buy new cars.
Finally, the fleabags in charge allow the long-suffering populace to buy imported autos, only for them to be priced beyond a Guajiro’s wildest dreams.

A Peugeot 508 is listed at $262,000. Peugeot’s UK website puts prices from $29,000. State salaries in Cuba average about $20 a month.

Wouldn’t you dread getting a dinner invitation from the maniacal chief of North Korea?
According to this report there’s no doubt that Kim Yung ‘un is bad, bad and definitely mad.

According to the report, unlike previous executions of political prisoners which were carried out by firing squads with machine guns, Jang was stripped naked and thrown into a cage, along with his five closest aides. Then 120 hounds, starved for three days, were allowed to prey on them until they were completely eaten up. This is called “quan jue”, or execution by dogs.